Thursday, April 22, 2010

House of Comments #22

Following Nick Clegg’s performance at the Leaders Debates, the Liberal Democrats have broken past Labour in the polls, and some polls are even putting them ahead of the Tories. Is this ’surge’ a flash-in-the-pan that will be gone by next week, or could it be sustained all the way up to election day?

Electoral mathematics make it unlikely the Lib Dems could win an election outright, but the political system is being given a shake up. With predictions that Labour could end up the party with the most seats but the smallest number of votes, will we soon be seeing electoral reforms come to pass?

The other parties seem unable to figure out a good line of attack against this third party uprising. We discussed some of the tactics they appear to be trying, and whether any of these have worked at all.

Chris was interviewed by Andrew Neil for The Daily Politics recently in his capacity as leader of the UK Libertarian Party, but by most accounts did not come off very well from the interview. We asked for his side of the story, and whether writing a blog under such an aggressive persona as Devil’s Kitchen is compatible with holding ambitions in the ‘respectable’ world of politics?